Issues With Loading Speed – Can You Help?

  • Good afternoon everyone! I’m new here so hopefully I’ve posted this query in the correct location. I’ve been having problems with the speed of my WordPress website for about a week now and despite a few attempts by me I’ve been unable to fix it. Hopefully some of you can point me in the right direction.

    What is my problem?

    The installation I need help with is located at https://www.yrea.org.uk and runs on WordPress version 3.2.1. The same installation has been here for at least the last 4 months if my memory serves me correctly and we haven’t had any speed issues up until this week. But I noticed that loading the website is now taking a very long time. I did a test before I posted this message and it took 1 minute 32 seconds to load our home page. Before, it would take less than 5 seconds. This is a problem that many of the members of my website have noticed, and its starting to really annoy everybody. I’m concerned people won’t use the website as much if they’re having to wait so long to view its pages.

    What have I tried so far?

    I’ve tried a few things to get my website running faster with limited success. At first I thought it might be due to the ads we serve in the top right (which is powered by OpenX) but after disabling these for a few days the site still ran just as slow as before, so I don’t think its the ads that are the problem.

    I then thought it could be a server issue. My host did a few tests and couldn’t find anything wrong but still offered to move my shared hosting account to another server to see if this helped. Unfortunately the speed is still just as slow as before even on the new server.

    So, I need your help.

    What do I try next to try and make WordPress speed up again? Thanks in advance for all your help, I look forward to seeing some replies.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Thread Starter HSTChris

    (@hstchris)

    Sorry to bump this topic but its sat idle for a while, can anyone help me out here?

    It loaded in about 5 seconds for me, so perhaps the issue is with your network, or local traffic conditions? Did you run a traceroute to see if the bottleneck is somewhere else along the line? I.E. one of the nodes between your connection at the wall and the server where your site is located?

    Thread Starter HSTChris

    (@hstchris)

    It loads OK when I use a cache plugin, but when I disable it its very slow indeed! Would you like me to disable that plugin so you can have another look? I’d rather not use the cache plugin you see as its very annoying when I make new posts.

    It could be due to you being on a shared hosting account. If another site on the server is using up a lot of resources it will slow down all of the sites on that server.

    Do you notice the slowdown happening at certain times or is it at random intervals? Your hosting company might not have found anything at the time because it is possible that if a site was slowing down the server whichever site is doing it wasn’t doing it at the time your host ran the tests.

    Well, it only took 5 seconds to load on my end, even with the plugin enabled as you discribe. I don’t think disabling it will change the fact that, for me anyway, your site loads as it should.

    I would suspect the issue is with your network connection, and not with the configuration of the WordPress site itself. If that was the case, it’d be slow for both of us.

    @ HSTChris

    It could be so many different things. Did you change anything before it got sluggish? You have 17 external javascripts trying to load on the home page. That’s quite a bit. Have you repaired/optimized your database? Have you asked your host if they recently changed/updated anything?

    Thread Starter HSTChris

    (@hstchris)

    Do you know what these 17 javascripts are? That sounds way more than I would like.

    HSTChris wrote:

    Do you know what these 17 javascripts are? That sounds way more than I would like.

    I don’t remember, but you can see for yourself with Firebug for Firefox. Some may not even be needed at the homepage and could probably be deregistered for only the needed pages with the right code. (Sorry, I can’t help you there.)

    You could try using a minifying plugin. But lately all have caused me more problems than they’re worth.

    Are you using a bridge for WordPress and you MyBB forum (or whatever forum you’re using)? I heard those can wreak havoc on a site. No experience myself though.

    It could also be database queries causing your problems, again I can’t help you there.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • The topic ‘Issues With Loading Speed – Can You Help?’ is closed to new replies.